Well I was trying to put it in context, as to why Mary made her comment, that she made the comment for a reason, it wasn't just an off the top of head comment, if you understand.
I'm reading stuff on Voodoo in NOLA, it seems it still occurs but in greatly diminished fashion, as opposed to decades ago where it was commonly practiced.
I can tell you all about Voudoun/Voodoo. I'm just waiting for the next pearl of brilliance from the inebriated.
It'd be interesting if we could have a thread about Voodoo, many people would learn a lot about a very strange, but interesting practice.
Well it looks like the Aussie is sleeping off a bender so..... Voodoo is basically a collaborative effort of American slaves who were taken from for the most part West Africa, particularly the Yoruba people, to re-assemble whatever bits of their native spirituality they had in their homeland. ""Voodoo" comes from Haitian-French
voudoun, and the same process is known in Spanish speaking Americas as
Santeria and in Brasil as
Candomblé. Part of the Yoruba world view is that the natural world and the supernatural world intersect, and is manifest in what are commonly mis-termed "gods" but really are more like "forces of nature", for example
Shango/Chango, the force ("god") of thunder. Others represent the sea, the flowing water of a river, fire, etc. These forces of nature (called
Orishas or
orixás in Brasil) can be, and are, summnoned to communicate through mystical music especially drumming. They appear by means of inhabiting the body of one of the participants, who goes into convulsions and chants things that, after the ceremony, they have no memory of.
That's all reconstructed from West Africa though, not East Africa where this event was.
And they certainly don't have "wood sprites".
Voodoo came to New Orleans from Haiti and flourished there too. In the 19th century Congo Square in New Orleans was the only place in the country where blacks were allowed (on Sundays) to express their culture, which they did with big drumming parties. This is part of the roots of the beginnings of Jazz decades later in the same city, pioneered by Buddy Bolden....
(/offtopic)